This month Sourceforge is featuring TuxPaint and Project Developer Bill Kendrick, for its "Project of the Month"

Tux Paint is a free, award-winning drawing program for children ages 3 to 12 (for example, preschool and K-6). It combines an easy-to-use interface, fun sound effects, and an encouraging cartoon mascot who guides children as they use the program.

Kids are presented with a blank canvas and a variety of drawing tools to help them be creative. (See the full list of features.)

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Why and how did you get started?
In mid-2002, a friend from my local Linux User Group mentioned that he installed Debian Jr. for his kids, and was surprised to find the only drawing program included was Gimp, which we both agreed was a little hard to use, even for adults. Having written a number of open source games for Linux, I decided I could probably whip together something to fill the gap.

Who is the software's intended audience?
Kids ages 3 to 12, though adults seem to enjoy it, too. It's also been used for special needs kids and adults.

What are a couple of notable examples of how people are using your software?
Schools all over the world use it, often as a free alternative to commercial kid's drawing software. For a while, it was actually one of the only viable programs for Mac, back when OS X first came out. Some art museums and children's hospitals have used it, too.

What are the system requirements for your software, and what do people need to know about getting it set up and running?
Tux Paint became popular quickly, so for most of its existence, it's been trivial to install.

On Windows, we provide both a self-contained installer ("setup.exe"-style), as well as a stand-alone version (in a folder in a ZIP file). We have two versions of each of those - one with some reduced functionality, that runs on Windows versions all the way back to Windows95, and the full version that runs on more modern Windows varieties.

The Mac versions have typically only been able to run on the most current versions of OS X, though of course it's possible to download previous versions of Tux Paint to run on older OS X systems.

Some popular Linux distributions provide Tux Paint as installable packages (search for "tuxpaint" package on Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora, for example), and we also create and post some RPMs, DEBs and TGZs files ourselves....[continued]

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You can read the full interview with Bill Kendricks at Sourceforge.

Tux Paint is completely free software, released as 'Open Source' software, under the provisions of the GNU General Public License (GPL). This means you may download it and install it on as many machines as you wish, copy it for friends and family, and give it to your local schools.